When more is given, more accrues...
“[L]ife offers no guarantees,” Sofía Segovia says, but “sometimes it does offer gifts”. Something given almost arbitrarily. Something unlooked for, unearned, unmerited, undeserved. A compassion handed out with caprice. Little things. Small victories. An incandescent flickering. Trust and hope and kindness and mutuality. The right words read at exactly the right time. A hand that finds yours in the dark. The voice reminding you that everything will be fine.
In the history of every writer is the story of a reader. A reader who received a gift. The gift of being welcomed, of being befriended by a book, of being seen, of being understood, of becoming less alone. The recipient of an assurance. A promise. That despite all their ill-fitting parts, there is somewhere they belong. A solid place upon a spinning globe. A stability within themselves. The writer is a reader who receives a gift and gives it back to the world.
This is the natural order of art, of being human, of being alive, of being whole, of being here, of everything. A balance. Not economy or exchange, but giving, receiving, and giving again and again and again and again.
If there is such a thing as the human soul, or any kind of soul for that matter, it exists as an ecology. A network of relations, a reciprocity, an equilibrium, a symmetry. The thing that sustains us, that must also be sustained.
“Your art places you in the world,” Nick Cave says, and “you feed off the world, off other artists, off your collaborators, off everything around you.” You turn light and earth and air and water into oxygen, sugar, and truth. Energy and acceptance. Climate and confession. Exhalations that branch, blossom, and bloom. Full of green potential. "But at some point," Cave says, You have to turn it around and pour it back into the world". Art must become an act of service. A eucharist. An offering. A perpetual giving of gratitude, grace, and good news.
This is what art needs of us. What it needs from us. What the world needs us to do. "You have to give from the deepest part of yourself,” Anne Lamott says, and “you…have to go on giving” all the more, until the giving becomes “its own reward." This is the verity of all creating, of all creation. The gift is the giving. The giving is the gift. When more is given, more accrues.
Maybe it doesn’t make sense. But, our responsibility is not to make it make sense, it's to make meaning, to make gifts, and to give them away.